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the last minute.
    Given the disdain I’d expressed for Everest over the years, one might reasonably assume that I declined to go on principle. In truth, the call from Outside had unexpectedly aroused a powerful, long-buried desire. I said no to the assignment only because I thought it would be unbearably frustrating to spend two months in the shadow of Everest without ascending higher than Base Camp. If I were going to travel to the far side of the globe and spend eight weeks away from my wife and home, I wanted an opportunity to climb the mountain.
    I asked Mark Bryant, the editor of Outside , if he would consider postponing the assignment for twelve months (which would give me time to train properly for the physical demands of the expedition). I also inquired if the magazine would be willing to book me with one of the more reputable guide services—and cover the $65,000 fee—thus giving me a shot at actually reaching the summit. I didn’t really expect him to say yes to this plan. I’d written more than sixty pieces for Outside over the previous fifteen years, and seldom had the travel budget for any of these assignments exceeded two or three thousand dollars.
    Bryant called back a day later after conferring with Outside’ s publisher. He said that the magazine wasn’t prepared to shell out $65,000 but that he and the other editors thought the commercialization of Everest was an important story. If I was serious about trying to climb the mountain, he insisted, Outside would figure out a way to make it happen.

    During the thirty-three years I’d called myself a climber, I’d undertaken some difficult projects. In Alaska I’d put up a hairy new route on the Mooses Tooth, and pulled off a solo ascent of the Devils Thumb that involved spending three weeks alone on a remote ice cap. I’d done a number of fairly extreme ice climbs in Canada and Colorado. Near the southern tip of South America, where the wind sweeps the land like “the broom of God”—“ la escoba de Dios ,” as the locals say—I’d scaled a frightening, mile-high spike of vertical and overhanging granite called Cerro Torre; buffeted by hundred-knot winds, plastered with frangible atmospheric rime, it was once (though no longer) thought to be the world’s hardest mountain.
    But these escapades had occurred years earlier, in some cases decades earlier, when I was in my twenties and thirties. I was forty-one now, well past my climbing prime, with a graying beard, bad gums, and fifteen extra pounds around my midriff. I was married to a woman I loved fiercely—and who loved me back. Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.
    None of the climbs I’d done in the past, moreover, had taken me to even moderately high altitude. Truth be told, I’d never been higher than 17,200 feet—not even as high as Everest Base Camp.
    As an avid student of mountaineering history, I knew that Everest had killed more than 130 people since the British first visited the mountain in 1921—approximately one death for every four climbers who’d reached the summit—and that many of those who died had been far stronger and possessed vastly more high-altitude experience than I. But boyhood dreams die hard, I discovered, and good sense be damned. In late February 1996, Bryant called to say that there was a place waiting for me on Rob Hall’s upcoming Everest expedition. When he asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with this, I said yes without even pausing to catch my breath.
     
    * Modern surveys using lasers and state-of-the-art Doppler satellite transmissions have revised this measurement upward a mere 26 feet—to the currently accepted altitude of 29,028 feet, or 8,848 meters.
    † Currently, the official Nepali designation for Mt. Everest is Sagarmatha, “goddess